Saturday, 28 November 2015

George & Mildred: a window on British history

They’re showing re-runs of George & Mildred on ITV3. For the uninitiated George & Mildredwas a very popular
sitcom that ran on British television between 1976 and 1979. I’m not heralding its
return as a momentous cultural event. The first few episodes were quite funny
and then it rather ran out of gas, in addition to spawning possibly the worst
TV to film adaptation in history, George
& Mildred: The Movie.

George & Mildred is
not noteworthy for its vintage comedy but rather what it says about recent
British history. Namely how it’s got a lot worse.

The scenario of George
& Mildred is illuminating: the eponymous couple, George and Mildred
Roper, receive a compulsory purchase order on their council house and move to …
wait for it …. Hampton Wick in West London. Now, situation comedy is meant to
stretch the bounds of believability, everything revolves around absurd
coincidences, but it can’t stretch the bounds of believability too far without ceasing
to work. In 1976, you could just about believe that a couple might move to
Hampton Wick after being forced to leave their council house. In 2015, the
average house price in Hampton Wick is £2.4
million and lawyers can’t afford to live there. As for council houses, more than 1.8
million families are on the social housing waiting list. But, remember,
this was the benighted 1970s.

There’s more. George is on the dole! Despite being able to
move to a semi-detached house in Hampton Wick, George doesn’t have a job
(neither does Mildred), although I think he eventually becomes a traffic warden. And,
what’s more, in stark contrast to his millennial descendants, he doesn’t possess
a scintilla of shame about his unemployed status. He’s ‘working class and proud
of it’, drinks brown ale and does ok on ‘social security’. That’s social
security, not ‘welfare’. A lot of the comedy of George & Mildred ensues from the horror of George’s
Conservative-supporting, estate agent, neighbour, Jeffrey Fourmile, that a socialist,
working class lay-about has moved in next door, and is constantly infecting his
seven year old son, Tristan with these dangerous ideas. It doesn’t work, sadly,
he grows up to become Tristan Hunt.

If you wanted to update George
& Mildred to contemporary Britain, George would undoubtedly have been
sanctioned multiple times and the couple compelled to beg at food banks. But in
those awful 1970s, despite not working for a living, George & Mildred are
upwardly mobile. That’s the crux of the comedy. Mildred is ‘aspirational’,
George isn’t, but they are constantly hitting against a middle class culture
that doesn’t really want them there. In 2015, George and Mildred would live
entirely segregated lives and be the object of scorn.

In the ensuing decades, Jeffrey Fourmile trampled all over
George Roper. In fact, the trampling is still going on. But in the 1970s George
Roper was evidently something of a threat. That’s why you constantly hear about
how terrible the ‘70s were. They actually look quite fun.

*Yootha Joyce, the actress who played Mildred, subsequently
became a bit of a cultural icon. She featured on a Smiths’ single cover. She
actually first met Brian Murphy (‘George’) on the set of the Joan Littlewood
directed 1963 film Sparrows Can’t Sing,
which was supposed to be an accurate depiction of East London life at the time
and was the first English language film to be subtitled in the US. There are
quite a few Smiths’ links in comedies being repeated on ITV3. In On the Buses, the bus route of the two
lead characters goes to the Cemetery Gates, another Smiths song title.

1 comment:

One interesting undercurrent to George & Mildred is that Jeffrey Fourmile, the archetypal 1970s Conservative, likes the BBC and berates ITV for 'chasing the ratings'. I think this is meant to be ironic because the series first aired on ITV but it's nonetheless a fascinating contrast to now. He has a 'Reithian' view of the BBC as upholding intellectual values and not appealing to the lowest common denominator of taste. Since the 1980s the Conservatives have hated the BBC for its supposedly liberal and elitist values but in the 1970s, if this programme is to be believed, Conservatives liked the BBC for holding back cultural decline. The total opposite.

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Capitalism is not beautiful, said John Maynard Keynes. It is not intelligent, it is not virtuous and it not just. “But when we wonder what to put in its place, we are extremely perplexed.”
This blog is about the ideologies that mask the ugliness and injustice beneath the surface. And how our perplexity might be diminished.
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